This chapter argues that the brevity and inherent orality of the Russian short story allows for the introduction of new, often stigmatised subject matter and for experimentation with form and language. The short story laid the groundwork for the novel, but not by providing shorter pieces to be assembled into a more complex plot. Rather, its role was to work out innovative aesthetic and thematic models that the novel would later carry into the cultural mainstream. For this reason, the short story often came to the fore during periods of literary and ideological change. The chapter presents the evolution of the Russian short story in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular attention to Anton Chekhov, the author who finalised the shift to what we now recognise as the typical concerns of the modern short story.

How to remember your new skills, and what to do with them.

There are certain foundations of effective communication, and all are revealed and explored in this chapter. They are: clarity, brevity, simplicity, authenticity, and – sometimes surprisingly – humility, or the power of listening.

A landmark orients, signals a turning point, indicates a boundary. Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678) was immediately recognized, both by those who disliked it and those who appreciated it, as announcing a new approach to plot structure, representation of society, plausibility (or its lack), and character development. Later the terms ‘psychology’ and ‘analysis’ were used to point to the narrative’s approach to portraying the feelings and thoughts of the protagonist. One of the most obvious ways in which the text distinguishes itself from other novels of its period is its brevity. This quality gives it particular staying-power as a landmark, making it useful in school curricula as an example of the literature of its period—though this use risks skewing the view of seventeenth-century novels by presenting a striking, innovative exception, as the norm. Because landmarks indicate boundaries, they can serve as symbols of the territories they define. La Princesse de Clèves serves today as a marker of the cultural tradition of France itself. It is thus at the centre of debates about the literary canon and of national identity. For both the seventeenth century and for the twenty-first, Lafayette’s work fuels debate.

Throughout his career as a writer, Borges strategically strove to create an image of James Joyce as the artificer of intricately woven labyrinths whose sheer scope and encyclopaedic bulk both fascinated and horrified him. The chapter charts the twists and turns of Borges’s ambivalent relationship with Joyce, from his 1925 review of Ulysses and translation of a page of its final chapter, to the development of a more problematic attitude where he sought to reposition his own art of brevity as the antithesis of Joyce’s epic legacy.

The style of the various editions of the Institutes is directly related to the audience for which the book was written, for Calvin was convinced that any book had to be accommodated to the capacities of its intended audience. John Calvin originally wrote the Institutes to be a catechism for the pious evangelicals in France, who had come to faith in the Gospel but who needed to have their faith built up and strengthened. “My purpose was solely to transmit certain rudiments by which those who are touched with any zeal for religion might be shaped to true godliness.” Because the audience was ordinary believers who needed to be edified, Calvin adopted a style that was accommodated to their capacities. “The book itself witnesses that this was my intention, adapted as it is to a simple and, you might say, elementary form of teaching.”1 As many scholars have noted, the format of Luther’s Small Catechism is clearly evident in the form of the first edition of the Institutes, as it is structured along the lines of the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer, followed by an extended discussion of the sacraments.

Epistles 1.20 is an unorthodox plea for length in court speeches. It is also one of the two salient peaks of ‘Quintilian in Brief’, a whole letter modelled, selectively and unpredictably, on Quintilian’s chapter on style (Institutio 12.10). This chapter reads it in detail, for argument and for intertexture, and shows that it is an imitative tableau of unusual complexity, focused on Institutio 12.10 but ranging widely across Quintilian’s work and looking through ‘windows’ to Cicero’s Brutus and Orator. The letter – addressed to Tacitus – also engages obliquely but closely with his Dialogus de oratoribus; Pliny’s anonymous interlocutor, I suggest, is a version of Tacitus’ Aper. A postscript on Epistles 1.21 reads this short note about buying slaves as a wry miniaturisation of Institutio 11, and sharp intertextual annotation of Epistles 1.20 and its virtuosic imitatio.